Kelly and I had a wonderful lunch today at Piccino. It was impromptu and delightful. It was delicious. And I can only assume it was composed of ingredients both organically and locally raised because, hell, what San Francisco neighborhood restaurant worth its blackboard specials would dare serve inorganically raised food shipped in from elsewhere? Today, food in California, and especially in the Bay Area, means so much more and is treated so much differently than it was when I was growing up in Massachusetts. It will be interesting to see if this new focus on "Food" is a fad or a movement. Will we look back in hindsight from 2020 and see this infatuation with local, organic and sustainable as a fundamental shift in eating habits or will it seem an indulgent blip on the radar of an ever more mechanized world?
The role of food in my life has certainly changed radically since moving to California in 1999. Growing up food meant family, as it does now, but it was served without much fanfare or variety. Now eating is an experience. Kelly remembers her childhood much the same as I do mine, and she was raised for the most part in Albany, a mere stroll from where Alice Waters started this entire movement at the venerable Chez Panisse. Her parents are Midwestern, mine from Boston, and both are of the same Baby Boom generation that came of age When America Ruled the World. The America of the 1950s and 1960s was on the move. It was growing tremendously. It was laying highway by the mile and building cars; containing Communism and sending men to the moon. After the victories against the Germans and the Japanese in WWII (which, in no small part was enabled by America's industrial capacity), industry was king. Why would food be treated any differently than cars, electronics or toys?
Bread was a Wonder, bleached and then enriched. Juice went to space, dehydrated, as Tang. The microwave was born and came to rule the kitchen where speed and efficiency would help defeat all foes. Farming truly became industrial and television helped turn food brands into national icons from sea to shining sea. This is not the only way to look at post-WWII America, of course, but it certainly is one way to view it. Industrial food production and marketing helped fuel the growth of a Superpower. One might even argue that the cheap and generally healthy calories of industrialized food were a necessary ingredient of that growth. And now perhaps those calories are having their revenge in the form of obesity, diabetes and cancer - a metaphor far too easy to invoke.
Is this changing? Are we changing? In the Bay Area we largely live in a post-industrial America: we are technologists, artists, financiers, and marketers. We create media and connections and tremendous amounts of wealth. Are we, here and now, reacting to the past 60 years of industrial food history or are we overreacting, an indulgent outlier population, to a 2000 year arc of ever more mechanized and processed food?
More qualified authors than I have tackled this topic and certainly with more than 500 words. I just wonder if in 2020 more people will be aware of their food's origin or fewer? Is this truly a movement or just a fad of the over-connected searching for bits of earth amongst the bits?
